Hood

Last November, when Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, the country watched, riveted and scared. But to the people of this small American city, war is nothing new.

War doesn't keep to a clock. It doesn't break for sleep, and it doesn't take weekends. And so that was artillery you heard last night from your bed. The rumble of exploding shells cracking the sky loud as thunder. Which war kept you awake? Well, both. Because Killeen, Texas, is every bit as much a war zone as Afghanistan and Iraq. As the home to Fort Hood, the largest military base in the country, this is where the war starts for thousands of soldiers processing through the readiness center, and it's where the war ends for thousands coming home. But it doesn't really end, because Killeen is always at war.

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I served in the infantry in Iraq and could never get over how a country at war could seem so manifestly unaware of it, couldn't get over how our wars could be such a complete abstraction to so many people.

Then I came to Killeen, which is just like any other small city in America, except thousands of its citizens are combatants, and it is impossible to get away from the war. The mural in a local steakhouse shows a languid blond hitchhiker, with cut-off jean shorts and a bared midriff, angling to get a ride from an Apache helicopter; trains laden with battle tanks roll through town; the business marquees advertise military discounts; Guns Galore is crowded with soldiers, many just back from deployment, buying military-style rifles. "Some guys want the guns they shot," a salesman says. "Some want the guns that were shot at them." You see fatigues at the laundromat, fatigues at daycare, fatigues on a walk in the park, fatigues at the grocery, at the tattoo parlor, at school, at mosque, fatigues with eyes clinched shut kneeling in the pew.

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Fort Hood, with about fifty thousand soldiers, has sent more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan than any other military post. One in fifteen hundred Americans is serving in the two combat zones today, but around Killeen that ratio at times is as high as one in seven. One of every four people here is in uniform, more than thirty times the national average. And if they're not in the Army, they work for the Army, they're retired from the Army, they're married to the Army, or they're born of the Army.

Hood has been the lifeblood of the surrounding communities for nearly seventy years. With so many steady paychecks, the town has been insulated from the economic pain that has debilitated so many other places. Soldiers keep the restaurants full and the car dealers busy, and 70 percent of Killeen workers are employed by Fort Hood. The area had withered during the first Gulf war, when many wives and their children returned to hometowns, so Killeen built parks, improved the schools and public safety, helped build houses soldiers could afford, and lured popular restaurant chains so that when the next war came, families would stay. And when the war came, they stayed.

Since then, nearly 550 soldiers from Hood have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every so often, you can see the casualty-notification officers drive into neighborhoods and stir silent pleas: Let them keep driving. Don't stop at my house.

The town now has dozens of recent war widows, who migrate to one another for support. One woman moved from Germany to Killeen after her husband was killed to be surrounded by people who know the same loss. At a Killeen high school just outside Fort Hood, where eight of ten kids come from military families, hundreds of blue-and-silver stars line the hallways, inscribed with the names of deployed parents. Above the entrance hang nine gold stars, for the nine parents killed in action. In some Fort Hood mess hall, pictures of the dead hang on the walls. A soldier sits in a local café and plucks at a guitar and sings a song he calls "Dinner with the Dead."

Killeen is a town built on sacrifice, obedience, and duty. It's a company town, and business has been pretty good.

A long workday done, Chris Gojdycz eases himself onto a stool near the pool table. He woke up at 3:00 A.M. and marched seven miles to a shooting range, fired at targets all day, then marched home. Now he and Sean Villa, a buddy from basic training, drain a couple bottles of Bud Light.

"Did you hear that shit last night?" Gojdycz asks Villa. Nearly asleep, Gojdycz had rolled right out of bed and onto the floor at the first artillery report, sure for a sliver of a second that he was back in Iraq, on the Iranian border. "Over there, it was kind of funny," he says. "Here? That's not cool."

A waitress slides up to the table with a tray of Jäger bombs. Villa buys a round.

When they first came back from Iraq, they were drinking most nights, so they've been cutting back to just weekends, often ending up here, at Ernie's Sports Bar, on the edge of Killeen. They know the bouncers in case things get out of hand. Commanders periodically make some of the local bars off-limits because of the fights. But Ernie's hasn't been on the no-go list in a while, and this night's crowd is mellow.

Villa and Gojdycz spent a year in Iraq at a small forward operating base that regularly attracted mortars and 122mm rockets. The insurgents had a decent spotter, because the rockets landed closer and closer until one exploded in a neighboring tent, just beyond a row of tall concrete blast barriers. Villa ran around the wall and into the tent and found a soldier deconstructed. "There was a vest and a Kevlar, and the rest was just tomato soup," he says. The soldier next to the dead man had only been nicked on the forehead. "We call that military math," he says. Letters and pictures from the soldier's family had scattered across the floor next to a shard of a CD with the words FROM MOM written in marker. Villa was among the soldiers tasked to pick up the pieces, which didn't bother him at the time. As a boy, he helped neighbors slaughter sheep and pigs. And in high school, he worked in a suburban Chicago funeral home. So he was used to blood and bone. "I wasn't trying to be John Wayne or anything, I just didn't know the guy," he says. "If it had been one of my buddies, I probably would have freaked out."

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Same with the twelve soldiers and one civilian murdered on November 5 by Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan. The rest of the country freaked out. For a moment, the war had encroached on their peaceful, oblivious lives. It's not that it wasn't a bad scene at Hood, it was. It's just that here it's war all the time. "If it didn't affect your unit," one soldier told me, "it was business as usual."

Soldiers have an unusual line of work. Pressure builds. And this is what can happen when a war goes on as long as this one has.

Several soldiers I met at Fort Hood said they had been expecting somebody to start shooting, and were surprised it hadn't happened sooner. The night before Hasan's rampage, a soldier had gone walking through his neighborhood in Killeen carrying a loaded shotgun; he would tell a fellow soldier the next morning that he'd intended to shoot the first person he saw. And in the years before the shooting, several soldiers had been killed at Fort Hood. Another seventy-five killed themselves since 2003, during deployments or afterward, double the national average. Two of the killings, both in 2008, were murder-suicides. A soldier shot one of his lieutenants, then killed himself, and a sergeant killed his wife, also a soldier, and then himself.

A few weeks after the Hasan shootings, another soldier was murdered, and this one Villa knew. Several soldiers and their wives and girlfriends had gathered to drink at a small house in Killeen on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Among them was David Middlebrooks, a twenty-year-old infantryman who'd returned from Iraq in June and would have been a civilian by Christmas. Soldiers he served with told me he'd been in trouble a few times for drinking. Every unit has a couple guys like that. Some don't have the discipline for military life; others are drinking or smoking away personal problems or combat trauma. They might get ostracized or picked on, and the joking can be brutal. Even if a guy's wife is cheating on him, he gets hazed mercilessly. He'll go along with it, with the guys, calling her a whore, too, but it destroys him.

"In the infantry, they just eat their own," Villa says.

Middlebrooks had already scuffled with two other soldiers that night. Near 3:00 A.M., he argued with a third soldier, who left the party but returned two hours later, when everybody was asleep or drunk. The soldier lunged at Middlebrooks as though to punch him, but instead shoved a knife into his heart. His friends found him outside, bent at the waist and gasping for breath. One soldier pressed a shirt over the hole in his chest, and another breathed for him, but Middlebrooks was soon dead. The next night, another soldier, Private Joshua Wyatt, was shot to death in his apartment in Killeen.

In a long war, they say, military life and real life can be very incompatible. And even the well-adjusted can become unmoored. Throw in a troubled soul, and Nidal Malik Hasan starts to make sense. So when you bring up the Muslim-terrorist theory of the Hasan rampage to the guys at Ernie's, they counter with an explanation far less exotic: the loser theory. "You don't have any friends," Villa says. "You can't get laid. You're a nobody. Of course you're going to want to shoot everyone up. Anyone who's read Freud can figure it out."

It seems plain that Hasan had become radicalized and that the prospect of fighting a war against Muslims had contributed to his derangement. But Hasan also had a pet parakeet, and he loved this parakeet dearly, so much so that he would even let the bird eat from his mouth. And when he rolled over in bed one day as he took a nap and crushed the parakeet, Hasan would never get over it.

And so to the guys at Ernie's Sports Bar, Hasan was a fanatic, yes, but moreover, a loser. And ultimately, the loser theory of Hasan's crimes may be more troubling than the terrorist theory. For in all the wide world, and at Fort Hood, too, there are a lot more losers than terrorists.

An Army major lives well. On top of an annual salary of about $80,000 — and more for specialty professions, like doctors — the housing allowance exceeds $1,200 per month for those stationed at Fort Hood. A single officer might rent a duplex in Harker Heights or Copperas Cove, two nice areas near base. He'd have two or three bedrooms, a fancy bathroom, maybe a Jacuzzi, and a kitchen with an island — all for less than $1,000. While not military housing — those subdivisions, like Comanche Village and Pershing Park, are reserved for families — most of his neighbors would be soldiers. He'd see them headed to physical training before dawn. Maybe he'd grill with them on the weekends. That's what most Army officers do.

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Hasan lived in downtown Killeen, in a dingy one-bedroom apartment, about 450 square feet, for which he paid $325 per month. The Casa Del Norte apartments are made up of two two-story buildings, seven units per floor, that face each other, with a grassy courtyard in the middle. Hasan lived in the eastern building, upstairs, in apartment 9, second from the end. From the covered walkway he could see the fence that separates Killeen from Fort Hood and hear reveille each morning.

As you walk into Hasan's apartment, the first thing that strikes you is that this is a room for an itinerant in an itinerant town. There's his prayer rug in the corner of the front room next to his paper shredder, his shoes piled behind the door, an Army physical-training uniform balled up on a shelf next to an empty box for a laser-pistol sight. There are clothes in the dryer. Walk into the bathroom and it looks as though he'll be right back. Toothbrush, Crest, razor. Towels neatly folded. In a hallway closet sits a stack of personal business cards advertising: BEHAVIORAL HEALTH — MENTAL HEALTH — LIFE SKILLS, with no mention of his military affiliation. In the kitchen, a book on Islamic dream interpretation and a cup of coffee on a small table next to an empty refrigerator and bare cupboards and a stack of papers on the counter, including an old psychiatry exam from his residency at Walter Reed. And next to the test papers, a letter from Texas State Low Cost Insurance for a claim Hasan filed in August when a neighbor, a fellow soldier who had served in Iraq, keyed Hasan's 2006 gray Honda Civic and tore off a bumper sticker that said ALLAH IS LOVE. Hasan told neighbors that, as it was Ramadan, he forgave the man, but he also complained to family and some friends that he was frequently ostracized by fellow soldiers and called derogatory names.

I step out of the apartment and stand at the end of the courtyard, talking with a retired Navy man who used to live nearby. He's heard about the Muslim slurs, too. "I'm black," he says. "I've been called names all my life. But you don't see me going and fucking with people. That's his job, to keep people from doing these kinds of things." We watch people trickle by to see the memorial erected in the grass: thirteen American flags and thirteen candles arranged in semicircles around pictures of the victims. The apartment owner initially had placed a bouquet of flowers in front of the building the day after the shooting. But several people, including an FBI agent, thought someone had left it as a statement of support for Hasan, so the memorial grew into a more obvious expression of sympathy for the dead.

The Navy man tells me about a friend who was shot to death nearby. "This is a bad part of town," he says. "Infested with drugs and prostitution. Why would a major be here? He was a damn good loner for them not to know this."

Patricia Villa lived next to him, in number 8. She moved in a month before the shooting and had spoken to him just a few times, but had more interaction with him than most people. After the shooting, when another local saw Villa and said, "Your neighbor, he killed all those people," she wondered why Hasan didn't start his rampage at Casa Del Norte, and decided that it was because "we never did anything to him," she says. Other people have asked her if she's angry with Hasan. She is not. "I don't have anything bad to say about him," she says. "I'm grateful for what he did for me. He helped me a lot."

The Tuesday before the shooting, as she and her husband sat in lawn chairs on the covered walkway outside their apartment, Hasan approached, with his usual big smile, and handed her a Koran, in Spanish, which she couldn't read. The next morning he knocked on her door. "When you have time," he said, and gave her an En-glish Koran. He asked if she'd like some vegetables and returned with three bags of fresh fruit and frozen broccoli and spinach. He stood in the doorway and peered into the apartment. The front room, which serves as her kitchen, dining room, and living room, was empty, save for a table and two chairs and a portable stereo sitting on the floor.

"It looks like you need some furniture," Hasan said. "I have some shelves, and they match your table." He also brought folding chairs, an alarm clock, a microwave oven, a clothes steamer, and clothes for her husband. "Are you moving?" she asked.

Let it not be a Muslim, Osman Danquah muttered to himself as he watched the first TV news reports about a gunman shooting soldiers at Fort Hood. Let it not be a Muslim. And then he heard the name, which sounded so familiar: Nidal Malik Hasan. And then he saw the picture of the soft-faced, balding doctor who had recently sat for a meal in his home.

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"Devastated, man," Danquah says. "I was devastated."

He and I are sitting on the green carpet in the large gathering space of Killeen's only mosque, a redbrick box on the southern edge of town that, with no minaret, looks disguised as a Masonic Lodge. Fifty men had shown up for Friday prayers. As snowflakes swirled outside, the men collapsed to their knees and brought their foreheads to the floor in supplication. They listened to the imam preach about a Muslim's duty to strive for peace. Now they are moving into a side room for a lunch of curried chicken, lentils, and rice. A man approaches Danquah, clasps his hands, and offers a greeting in Arabic, and then turns to me, hand extended.

"How you doing, man? You new in the neighborhood?"

"Just in town visiting," I say.

"Oh, you're just spying on us," he says. "That's okay. We invite everybody."

Danquah laughs deeply. He has become accustomed to scrutiny.

He moved to Killeen in 1976, driving from Panama, where he had been stationed for two years, through Central America and Mexico into the flatlands of central Texas. He grew up in the lushness of Jamaica but liked the open space of Killeen. He calls it elbow room. He bought land and built the house where he still lives, and he cofounded the Muslim community at Fort Hood. There are still few Muslims in the military today, several thousand, but when Danquah was drafted in 1971, there were basically none, and the Fort Hood congregation numbered fewer than ten. "I considered myself a pioneer in the military. When you're a pioneer, you don't have the ease and comfort. It's chopping down trees, it's running over snakes, it's building log cabins. You're faced with all kinds of trials," Danquah says. Negative reactions were limited in part, no doubt, because America didn't yet know what terrorism was, and wasn't yet at war in two Muslim countries. And for small-town America, Killeen had a well traveled population. Many residents had served overseas in the military. Still, the Muslims were often regarded with suspicion. "You're faced with prejudices. You're faced with ignorance. People fear the things they don't know. So it's an education process," Danquah says. "But it takes courage. It takes moral courage."

The Muslims moved from Fort Hood to an apartment in Killeen, and a decade ago built their present mosque. The community has grown to a hundred families, and among them are several active-duty soldiers and a dozen veterans. For Muslim soldiers newly stationed at Fort Hood, the mosque is a ready-made community, and Danquah reaches out to new arrivals. Late last summer, he invited an Army doctor to his home for dinner. Afterward, Hasan asked Danquah for counsel, as both a Muslim leader and a retired First Sergeant.

"What if a Muslim soldier comes to me with reservations about deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan and fighting other Muslims?" Hasan asked. "What should I tell him?"

"I said, 'There's no draft. All the people who come into the military are volunteers. So the question is, Why did he come in the first place?' " But what if the remorse only surfaces after the soldier has joined the Army? the doctor asked, and Danquah, fifteen years retired, gave a military man's answer: The soldier should tell his chain of command.

Danquah did not share Hasan's qualms. He had spent five months in the Middle East during the first Gulf war and says he found no inherent conflict in Muslims fighting Muslims, because the war was just. Explaining this to me, he cited the Koran for emphasis: If two brothers have a conflict, you should make peace between them. And failing that, take the side of the one that is right.

A month after the first dinner, Hasan again asked Danquah for counsel. "What should I tell a Muslim soldier who is reluctant to fight other Muslims?" he asked again.

"I said, 'Man, you asked me the same questions the last time we met. Do you think I'm going to have a different answer for you?' " The question riled Danquah, and even in the retelling his voice rises. He thought of the young Jordanian arrested in Dallas a few weeks earlier in an FBI sting after trying to detonate what he thought was a truck bomb. Hasan must be a federal agent, Danquah thought, posing as an Army doctor to trick him, to accuse him of sowing dissent within the military by telling Muslim soldiers their religion puts them at odds with America's foreign policy. Hasan was setting him up.

"I said, 'Something is wrong with you.' I told him, straight to his face. He just looked at me." A few weeks later, Hasan requested to be a lay leader at Fort Hood, ministering to Muslim soldiers, and the mosque president asked Danquah's opinion. "No," he said. "No. There's something wrong with him."

Others at the mosque noticed this, too. Hasan prayed there several times a day, but he made few friends and was painfully reserved. Victor Benjamin had prayed near Hasan the night before the shooting and spoke to him several times after prayers. "You ever see an abused dog? When you move your hand sharply, it flinches," he says. "But even before that, before you raise your hand, you can see it in the eyes." That was Hasan.

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Benjamin, a recent convert to Islam, had started praying at the mosque a month earlier and saw the shootings as a test of his faith. He had served in the Army in the late 1990s as a helicopter crew chief and later worked for three years as a civilian contractor repairing helicopters in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He started reading the Koran in Tikrit, to learn something about the men pummeling his base with rockets and mortars. When he came home, he used alcohol and weed to fall asleep and to mellow himself against petty stresses, but he kept reading the Koran, which brought him to the mosque. "If I can't blur my mind with substances because I need to keep my lines of communication with God clear, that's a good thing," he says. He wears long sleeves now to cover his tattoos, though BENJAMIN is still visible across the top of his left hand. He can now say the basic prayers and is learning to read the Koran in Arabic.

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Benjamin doubts the depiction of Hasan as either jihadi or traumatized soldier; rather, he sees him as a misfit, the beaten dog, who used Islam as an excuse. "He had a brotherhood. He had somewhere to find peaceful resolution to his issue. But that wasn't his desire. He perverted that," he says. "Islam was a safe haven for him. It gave him a sense of unity and brotherhood that the military wasn't giving him. It's like a man who cheats. He's going after something his wife isn't giving him. For Nidal, Islam was his mistress."

Danquah and I move into a side room at the mosque, sit at a folding table, and eat plates of the spicy curried chicken and lentils and drink 7Up from plastic cups. He tells me about the Koran's teachings on caring for one's neighbors and the imperative to protect life and not take a life without due process. "There is no imperfection in Islam. Muslims, the human beings, have imperfections," he says. "We should never use the people to judge the book. We should use the book to judge the people."

Like other Muslims in Killeen, Danquah feels betrayed by Hasan, the newcomer they had welcomed into their community and homes. But he is also frustrated with the Army, to which he gave twenty-two years. "Clearly he lost his mind. And he lost it before he got here. And they knew it. And they didn't do anything about it. They kicked the can down the road. My mother used to say, 'Taking the shortcut draws blood. The long way only draws sweat. Don't take the shortcut.' I know the military is stretched, and they need all the manpower they can get. But the chain of command should be more in tune with their personnel. We don't kick the can down the road. We deal with the matter."

Now it's obvious to everyone that Hasan should have been discharged from the Army. He received terrible performance reviews, colleagues complained about his extreme statements, and he made it known that his loyalties weren't with the Army. But it's also obvious why he wasn't kicked out. A decade ago, fewer than 80 percent of captains were promoted to major. Today, because so many officers leave the military, often burned out by repeated deployments, promotions have jumped to about 95 percent. And because Hasan served in mental health, one of the Army's most critical but most short-staffed fields, there was even less incentive to get rid of him. Between basic training, medical school, and a psychiatry residency, the Army had already invested twelve years and several hundred thousand dollars in Hasan.

When he arrived last July, Fort Hood put him to work interviewing troops headed to and coming from the wars. Hasan would try to have several patients prosecuted for war crimes based on stories they told him in therapy sessions. The Resilience and Restoration Center, the post's outpatient behavioral-health clinic, to which he was assigned, is overwhelmed by the current level of need. Dr. Adam Borah, the RRC's clinical director, told me that "there's no question that the demand for services does exceed capacity." Every day 220 soldiers and family members cycle through the clinic with flashbacks, depression, anger issues, and all manner of disorders. But if you're not among the sixty-five or so daily emergencies — suicide attempts, homicidal thoughts, breakdowns — you'll have to wait up to five weeks for counseling. To ease that pressure, soldiers are regularly sent to doctors and therapists in Killeen and surrounding towns, which some soldiers prefer. The Army has made a serious push in recent years to reduce the stigma of seeking mental-health care, but many soldiers are still hesitant to talk to a doctor in uniform, concerned about professional repercussions or just being perceived as weak in a macho environment. "Soldiers are so terrified that if they ask for help, they're going to get kicked out of the Army. I've seen it time after time," a former cavalry scout at Fort Hood named Chuck Luther says. "They tell me, 'I've got three kids to feed. What am I going to do? I've been an infantry soldier since I was nineteen.' And they're right. The Walmart isn't going to hire this guy with PTSD who's trained to kill people and who got kicked out of the Army because they said he was crazy."

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While in Iraq in 2007, Luther was diagnosed with a personality disorder, which the Army said had existed before his enlistment. He was sent home and discharged, with fewer benefits than if he'd been diagnosed with PTSD. "The day they kicked me out of the Army I was thirty-six, and I thought, What am I going to do now? Now I'm just messed up," he says. To protest the way he'd been treated, he planned to kill himself on the steps of the Fort Hood headquarters. But on the way home to retrieve a pistol, he thought of his pregnant wife and three children and figured that, at least for them, he should try to fix himself. He now runs Disposable Warriors, which helps soldiers, many of them with PTSD, navigate military bureaucracy. He still wears desert combat boots, because that feels the most normal, and a cell phone holstered on his hip that vibrates constantly. He lets most calls go to voice mail, but the names marked with asterisks, the suicidal soldiers, those he always takes.

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Luther deals with a tiny minority of soldiers, but it is these individuals who are the most vulnerable and the most volatile, creating quite a problem for the Army. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stretch on and the cases of combat stress mount, the Army has undergone a cultural shift, forced to pay closer attention to the needs of individual soldiers. For an institution that recruits and trains huge groups of young men and women — about seventy thousand a year — sameness and an ability to perform a task with competence and without complaint are prized qualities. Soldiers with discipline problems — let alone homicidal thoughts — absorb a disproportionate amount of a commander's attention, draining time and resources from the others, which can degrade group readiness and performance. The Army can ignore the soldier and hope the problem goes away, as it did with Hasan, or it can discharge the soldier for the health of the organization, or it can help him work through the problem, so he can return to his job.

In recent years much more effort has been put into the third way, with programs like the Warrior Combat Stress Reset Program. The three-week course helps soldiers overcome PTSD symptoms like anger and hyperarousal through individual and group counseling and nontraditional therapies like cranial massage, tai chi, and acupuncture. But space is currently limited to twelve per class, and figuring out which soldiers are worth the extra effort and which problems can be overcome is hard. Is the soldier a poorly disciplined troublemaker, or is he acting out because of combat stress or maybe a marriage hobbled by repeated deployments? "They go out and start drinking, and they start getting in fights, and they start getting angry, and beating people, and killing themselves. The ugly comes out and they say, 'Well, he was just a bad soldier,' " Luther says. "No, he wasn't a bad soldier. Before you deployed him, he had commendations in his file talking about what a great soldier he was. Now all of a sudden he's a dirtbag because you broke him and you didn't try and help him?"

Military medicine thrives during conflicts, and those with broken bodies have fared better during these wars, outfitted with composite skulls and robotic limbs. But a mangled leg is far easier to recognize, and treat, than a fractured mind. When a soldier breaks, the pieces are hard to reassemble. So Fort Hood wrestles with a puzzle: How can it keep its soldiers from breaking?

Train their brains.

"People who get PTSD usually don't have the coping skills to deal with what they have to deal with, so their mind did the best it could and put walls up," says Jim Ruesch, a former Army Ranger and Special Forces sniper. "But if you go through proper preparation and anticipate every contingency, you tend to be more resilient in how you handle it." From a warren of old offices and classrooms Ruesch runs the post's Army Center for Enhanced Performance, which helps soldiers set goals, build confidence, and control their bodies' reaction to stress. If the mind works better under duress, soldiers might avoid situations that lead to lasting psychological trauma — shooting a civilian, for instance — or deal better with trauma that does occur.

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In a nearby hallway, Specialists Jason Langston and Gregory Sibley, loaded with combat gear, trot on two treadmills. Sports psychologist Beth Athanas yells, "Stack!" and the two jump off, grab M4 rifle simulators that fire laser beams, and stack against a cement wall next to a metal door. Their chests heave, sucking in breath. Another soldier kicks open the door and Sibley and Langston rush into the room and shoot dead two video-game insurgents firing at them from two giant flatscreen TVs hanging on the walls.

"Did you have a chance to do the tactical breathing?" Athanas, who is running the exercise, asks them. She had taught them to calm themselves by breathing four seconds in, holding one second, and four seconds out.

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"Your mind and adrenaline are going," Langston says. "It's hard to remember to breathe like that."

Sibley and Langston catch their breath as two more soldiers run through the exercise. Sergeant Daniel Scott, their team leader, follows behind and laughs when one insurgent doesn't fall dead. "Shoot the fucking dude," he says.

The performance lab is housed on Fort Hood's Resiliency Campus, the first of its kind, a city-block-sized compound that shows just how frustrated the Army was with its old approach to mending minds. In a former chapel converted into a spirituality center, soldiers can meditate or relax in plush chairs as classical music or Buddhist chants play softly. A small library has books about finding inner peace and the effects of battle on the soul. Outside, the Army built a reflecting pool with a gravel walking path, little waterfalls, and an arched bridge over pools filled with fish. The campus also offers counseling for marital and financial problems, two of the biggest sources of soldier stress. The commandant of the Resiliency Campus, a colonel who led an artillery battalion in a violent pocket of Baghdad, now sifts through résumés for yoga instructors and sketches designs for a massive rock-climbing wall in the campus's gymnasium, where fitness classes are taught. His latest interest is the stress-reduction powers of transcendental meditation.

Traffic is light in the spirituality center. Soldiers like Sibley and Langston still aren't sold on meditating and reflection pools, but they love Ruesch's brain training. The Fort Hood police officers who shot Hasan had trained at ACEP as well, and Ruesch runs me through an exercise they had done to improve attention and focus.

Ruesch hands me a rifle simulator and stands me in front of a large blank projection screen. Small targets appear one at a time, randomly across the screen. Some are marked with red x's, designating noncombatants. Into the others I fire two rounds, which show up as red laser dots. The exercise is mentally exhausting. As each new target pops up, I shift my attention to determine whether or not to fire. Another target appears and my eyes dart to the other side of the screen. All the while, a sensor connected to my earlobe measures the rhythm of my heart. The wild fluctuations jump across a laptop screen, like seismograph readings during an earthquake. I try to remember the tactical breathing but soon forget. I can feel my heart beating faster, my breathing ragged. When I focus on my heart rate or breath, I stop paying as much attention to the targets. I fail badly.

"You were too narrow in your focus," Ruesch says, which means that while focusing too intently on one target, I lost sight of the bigger picture, leaving myself open to being killed by another threat. Intense focus is extremely exhausting, and a body can maintain that level of intensity for only so long before something bad happens. Ruesch teaches "soft focus," watching the center of the screen while using peripheral vision to scan and acquire targets. He compares it to a lifeguard's ability to spot the struggling swimmer at a crowded beach. For soldiers, it could mean spotting a thin wire running across a road or a man peeking around a corner holding a detonator. And by controlling breathing and heart rhythm, soldiers can both conserve energy and stay more clearheaded in a moment of crisis.

"That little edge," he says, "can be the difference in coming back on your feet or on your back."

It's odd to think of peaceniks in Killeen, but they're here and have been since Vietnam. Back in the day, the gathering spot was a coffeehouse call Oleo Strut, named after an aircraft shock absorber, meaning that this was the place to come for a soft landing, the place to come talk about your problems. Today, it's been reincarnated as Under the Hood Café, opened last year by a longtime Army wife.

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On Veterans Day, I sit with a dozen men and women at a long table under a shade tree outside Under the Hood Café and listen to Bridget Chamberlain read a story about her ex-husband's nightmares. After Iraq, he had soothed himself with liquor and drugs, and at night she often sat in bed and watched him thrash in his sleep. "You never talk about why this happens," she says, her voice small. "You say there's nothing wrong and everything will be okay. Someday, you tell me, this will all just go away. It persists. It is real. It does exist. I beg and plead for you to get help. You go along, still pleading nothing's wrong. You pushed me away. I wanted to help. You broke down and finally went. Diagnosis: PTSD."

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Several nod in agreement. "It's been five years since I was deployed," Aaron Hughes tells Chamberlain, "but I just think about how deep the ripples are, how blind I am to how I affect the people around me."

Hughes works for Iraq Veterans Against the War, which organizes the writing workshops to help veterans process their experiences. He served in Iraq as an Army truck driver in 2003 and 2004. "In military culture, you follow orders. It's not about your feelings or your reactions to things. You're taught to react the way the Army wants you to react. That's what makes you a good soldier," Hughes says. "This is a different tool for tackling things outside of what we're given by the military. Either you take some drugs or you go see a counselor. There are very few options for self-healing."

"When everything else fails," says Malachi Muncy, a local Iraq vet, "you can still get a pen and paper."

Three in the group are active-duty soldiers and members of IVAW, which puts them in a lonely minority at Fort Hood. Chance Mills, an artilleryman who spent a year in Iraq, sought help from military mental-health services for combat stress.

"I grew up a very angry person," Mills tells the others. "I felt powerless, and I felt I could use all this rage I had in a good way." He reads a paragraph about the beginning of his Iraq deployment: "Ready to kill ... I've wanted to be here all my life. I can't wait to see a dead body. I can't wait to make a dead body. I can't wait to be a dead body. Which way to the war?"

Which way? Any way you want, because all paths lead to the same place, where the war over there and the war at home become one. And on Veterans Day, the paths lead downtown, where a parade winds along streets lined with families, kids waving small flags. A color guard of Fort Hood soldiers leads a procession of Cub Scouts, Shriners in go-karts, marching bands, dance troupes, politicians, beauty queens, firefighters, and a dozen veterans groups. The parade seems vast and endless. I ask a man wearing a 1st Cavalry baseball cap if it is bigger than usual, if more people had turned out because of the shooting. "Nope," he says. "It's about like this every year."

A dozen Vietnam veterans, gray and soft, ride on a trailer led by two men hoisting a Welcome Home banner. Learning the lessons of war sometimes takes decades. Farther back, a glimpse of the future: Tomorrow's veterans, hundreds of them, march in dark-green dress slacks and light-green shirts, ribbons and pins across their chests. In many high schools, the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs are small; around Fort Hood, they are enormous. The students are ordered by height, tall to short. Some of those in the back are barely five feet tall, belts cinched around beanpole waists. They were no more than seven when America went into Afghanistan. Student platoon commanders march beside them and call out cadences. The cadets thunder back in response. Coming from military families, many of these boys and girls will soon join the military and march to the same cadences at basic training. They already know more about war than almost anyone else. They know something about sacrifice, too, and they've heard the thunder of the big guns at night. But on this day, they are still children.